"Scenes of Extraction" (2023) creates an archival constellation from the still and moving images of British Petroleum Archives, documenting the expansive colonial network behind the British geophysical expeditions that spanned across Iran, but also reached other British oil operations in Southeast Asia. The film focuses on the parallel production of geological and ethnographic surveys, both through amateur geological footage and official technical film surveys produced by BP. It weaves through decades of archival documents to parse out the visual history of the “reflection seismography” method for oil exploration which was heavily tested across the Iranian oil belt despite its destructive and speculative nature.

"One Image, Two Acts" (2020) unravels the multifaceted and intertwined systems of oil infrastructures spanned and accumulated across unlikely geographies and material temporalities. Examining the photographic and film archives of British Petroleum (BP) during its operations in Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait, this film traces the visual and media infrastructures through which oil has operated as an agent of power in the colonial episteme.

Bio: Sanaz Sohrabi is a researcher of visual culture and filmmaker. She works with essay film and installation as her means of research to explore the shifting and migratory paths between still and moving images, situating a singular image in a continuum of historical relations and archival temporalities. Since 2017, Sohrabi has done extensive archival research at the British Petroleum archives to engage with the history of photography and film practices of the British controlled oil operations in Iran, conducting a visual ethnography of resource extraction in relation to the media infrastructures of BP. Sohrabi’s works have been shown widely in exhibitions and festivals. She is currently a doctoral student at the Center For Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University.

Location: Critical Media Lab, Peterson Hall, Room 108.